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Sunday, February 19, 2006

Kirsten Kindler

One of Kirsten Kindler's wall hangings at ADA Gallery. All of her pieces in this show are assembled from cut-outs of magazine photographs, I think mostly advertisements; it isn't possible to identify the subjects of the original photos. I visited her studio once and she had a row of boxes on her worktable filled with shapes, separated by color. Lots of blues, greens, and darks.

This piece is not touching the wall, it's suspended at the top and casting shadows. I'm not sure if, with a piece like this, she knows what she is making from the start and cuts the shapes accordingly, or if she assembles something unplanned from the shapes she has cut. Maybe a little of both. This whole thing is taped together with scotch tape; it looks very fancy here but up close you can see all the tape and the scissor cuts that have been repaired with tape. It shimmies in the wind when the door opens and closes.

This is an interesting piece to compare to one of Carson Fox's wall hangings. They look similar, but Carson's piece is made of wire and synthetic hair, and brings to mind specifics like hair memorials and mourning. The interpretations of Kirstin's piece are more open, your idea of what the material might be (iron, cloth) shifts along with various associations (a closed gate, an illuminating chandelier).

The recontextualized glossy magazine source imagery is making me think of Paul Ryan'spaintings.

One of three mysterious milky rorschachs. Everything is obfuscated - the original source imagery, whatever it was in the magazine, is cut into this sort of creepy rorschach pattern and then placed under a milky piece of glass.

Many many interlocking rings, cut from magazine photos and taped together. Something bridal beautiful and also pond-scum gross. How does this get moved and stored? Click here to see it much larger and better.

Installation at ADA

Kirsten Kindler is the ONLY PERSON to have bought one of my paintings in 2005!!!

6 comments:

Kirsten work resembles the practice of Scherenschnitte (German for paper cutting). Yet a lot of the traditional Scherenschnitte that you see is modest, if not petite in size. I used to have a small picture of a cat that my ex-girlfriend and I got at an autumn festival in Springs, PA. I loved that cat.

Hey Martin, if it's any consolation to you: if I had a choice between buying one of your paintings a month versus paying for student loans, I'd be on a Bromirski Payment plan tomorrow... however, I don't have a choice and such luxuries neither one of us could live on.